Music Lists

5:03 am

Mon June 30, 2014

NPR Music's 50 Favorite Songs Of 2014 (So Far)

Songs announce themselves as essential in different ways. Some knock you off balance; some help you find your rhythm. Some insinuate themselves into your life slowly, until you can't imagine a time they didn't exist; some leap out of car windows, change the course of your week and then vanish.

The 50 songs collected here (presented in alphabetical order), were picked by NPR Music's team and our public radio partners around the country. They mean different things to each of us who love them, but they overlap in surprising ways. Below, you'll find more than one slow-building, ambivalent dance song; definitive statements from newcomers next to veterans who sound more fragile than ever; party chants that mix profanity with politics; ultra-minimalist hip-hop and guitar solos from the dudes you'd expect.

You end up with a playlist (on Spotify here, on Rdio here) that points out in too many directions to count, which is just what we want from our favorite songs: infinite potential. Pick one; follow it for a while. Find something new and essential.

The Mississippi mainstay has been relatively quiet since his debut was met with lukewarm reception in 2012. Here, he's spitting balls of flame, fury and frustration.

The Black Keys, "Weight Of Love"

Vibes and keys and beats and a slow-burn guitar solo, all before Dan Auerbach's vocals kick in (after that: bittersweet lyrics, three sisters singing harmonies and another guitar solo). This is how the once stripped-down-by-definition Black Keys open an album in 2014.

Sweetness and noise struggle for dominance in music that makes hardcore punk beautiful, and artfully conveys the tensions within singer Meredith Graves' reckoning within the demon — romance — that seems to capture us all.

Bruce Springsteen had "The River" — this Houston-raised Nashville insurgent crafts his own meditation on lifelong love and loss illuminated by an industrial landscape that's distinctly Southern, yet still universal.

Talk about defying expectations: a Brazilian artist who dares to ignore bossa nova and samba to deliver a moody indie rock ballad in Portuguese with a sax solo that made me look up from what I was doing and smile.

In this five-minute-long historical novel of a song, Cash and collaborators Rodney Crowell and John Leventhall gently transform the story of a Civil War marriage into a protest against the futility of combat.

Chicago's new kid on the block makes waves by veering away from his previous mixtape rap toward his hometown's house music roots with a song that may make you want a few too many drinks and a few too many hours on the dance floor.